Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 by Marilyn Irvin Holt (review)

The history of childhood is an interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on age as a central category of analysis. To understand better the lives of children in the past and the cultures that defined them, childhood historians often integrate the methods and concerns of the social sciences, media and cultural studies, educational and intellectual history, and material-culture studies. Much recent childhood scholarship has converged on the post–World War II period, examining the influence of politics, institutions, and the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s on young people. Books in this vein include Mickenberg’s work on radical children’s literature, Delmont’s study of American Bandstand, and de Schweinitz’s research on children and the civil-rights movement. ¹ Holt’s Cold War Kids is a helpful contribution to this growing historiography.

Holt seeks to understand the ways in which the presidential administrations of Truman and Eisenhower “reacted to special problems and needs associated with children and teenagers” (3). In particular, she examines the national discourse surrounding issues of education, health, and welfare in the postwar era. Faced with the prospect of growing prosperity and peacetime after years of depression and war, government entities took stock of the nation’s children and, in Holt’s words, asked, “Were existing programs enough, or did circumstances call for additional legislation and funding?” (7)

Holt organizes her narrative around the 1950 and 1960 White House Conferences on Children and Youth. Though not the first of their kind—Theodore Roosevelt launched the series in 1909—the postwar conferences were notable for their new focus on “all children,” not just the economically and socially disadvantaged, as well as their call for more federal involvement in the lives of children. Holt recounts the planning, proceedings, and outcomes of the conferences by drawing extensively on archival materials housed at the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries. Her first chapter provides a useful history of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, and her three subsequent chapters concentrate separately on the topics of education, child welfare (delinquency and dependency in particular), and health (namely, nutrition, disease, and physical fitness).

The book is at its best when Holt situates the work of various federal bureaus, committees, and departments within a larger cultural context. For instance, we learn that the President’s Council on Youth Fitness worried that television and suburban car culture might be contributing to the “subtle physical erosion” of America’s children (134). In her section on adoption, Holt explains how the efforts of the U.S. Children’s Bureau resonated with the postwar “obsession” with marriage, children, and family (82). At other times, the book could benefit from greater engagement with secondary sources that have already covered some of the more familiar ground in Cold War Kids, especially with regard to education in the 1950s (Kliebard, Clowse, Foster, and Hartman, for example, would all be vital resources for this kind of study).²